Process

My search for the Absolute has come through a process-oriented approach. After many years of experimenting and trying different ways to make an abstract painting, I've discovered that when one tries to remove the ego from the process, a pure art can be liberated from the psyche. Methodically applying paint with little or no thought involved is a powerful way to circumvent the ego and create something more archetypal and universal.

Rules of Travel, 2008, oil on canvas, 36x36 inches
© 2008 Diane McGregor

The grid is the underlying structure for all of my work. It weaves under the paint, like a thread, coming back up to the surface to reinstate itself, to lay claim to an area of the composition, then gently guides itself back down under the surface of the painting to emerge again in a later passage. It orders and regulates the pattern of the image.

I begin the painting process by methodically weaving together horizontal and vertical brushstrokes. This technique generates a grid substructure from the very earliest stages of the painting. The grid is then deconstructed, with an eye on the subtle balance of the composition. Eventually light and dark areas emerge, and I follow my intuition to guide the placement, color, and weight of the forms. Fragments of texture and highly saturated hues are left exposed, yielding an emotive quality to the content of the piece. Luminous, softly shifting color fields drift through the image, creating an ambiguous figure-ground relationship that pushes and pulls. I love that tension, movement, and mystery.

I use fan brushes which give a delicate, complex weave to the grid. Sometimes I drag the paint with a loaded brush, sometimes the stroke is smoothed out with medium. The carefully blended color fields are built up from hundreds of strokes, quietly polished into air, light, mist. Painting is my way of meditating, of going beyond the traps of the mind and allowing the moment to just be the action of each brushstroke. Moment upon moment, brushstroke upon brushstroke. The painting, then, becomes a record of a solitary, contemplative practice that is both private and shared.

Evolution of a Vision

My work over the past 25 years has gone through many evolutions and explorations -- a continual quest for what I call "The Absolute." It has been a search for a purity of abstraction and visual truth that articulates my deepest thoughts about beauty and aesthetics. For more than 15 years, my imagery derived from biomorphic abstraction, using organic forms in my work that related to emotional and spiritual connections I had to Nature and the human condition.

Over the last few years, the imagery in my work has been shifting in many ways, as I felt I had said all I could with biomorphic abstraction and I was ready to move on to something new. There was a clarity that was missing from my process and theories. I felt "The Absolute" was once again eluding me and I began an ardent quest to capture it for myself once again. I went to the Sahara Desert in early 2006, camping for a week in that great expanse, and when I returned I felt as though the experience had swept my former imagery out of me, totally and completely. I began to work exclusively with geometry and with a focus on light -- this seemed to me the most natural equivalent to the desert landscape that had stripped me clean of all former perceptions. Geometry, simple straight lines organized into rectangles and squares, gave me the opportunity to focus on light and color and its relation to form and atmosphere. That desert was all about the light -- the light reflecting on pristine dunes, the glorious starlight, the relentless wash of the sun on the landscape.

Working in a geometric format for a couple of years has helped me flesh out where my true interests lie. In my latest work, the Ambient Light Series, I feel I am finally approaching my own "Absolute" aesthetic. I am moving more toward "formlessness," a visual language that relies solely on color, texture, and light. Through this series, I have developed a process that allows the painting to come into its own in a slow and methodical way. I believe the repetitive technique I've been using creates the perfect conditions for "The Absolute" to evolve. I will write more of this process in a later post.

Diane McGregor: Working Space

I have titled my blog "Working Space" after Frank Stella's book of the same title. I am hoping that this blog will provide a conversation about art, pictorial theory, art history and criticism. I am passionately devoted to abstract and non-objective painting, and so my posts will most likely reflect that interest.

Stella writes in his book: "No one wants abstraction to turn itself around to accommodate the innate taste for illusionism; but abstraction has to recognize that the coziness it has created with its sense of reduced, shallow illusionism is not going anywhere. Caravaggio and Rubens made manageable pictorial sense out of the dynamic illustrative diversity of 16th century painting, building a strong base for future painting.... Somehow painting today, especially abstract painting, cannot bring itself to declare what Caravaggio and Rubens demonstated again and again -- that picture building is everything. Abstraction seems to be lost in a dream in which the materiality of pigment reveals painting. It puts too much hope in the efficacy of clever, random gestures. What is needed is a serious effort at structural inventiveness."